High-Beams
Interviews, features, book reviews, and more!
Few garments carry as much cultural weight as the hoodie. First created in the 1930s by the brand Champion to meet athletes' needs for warmth and durability, the hoodie slowly became a marker of style, anonymity, suspicion, and resistance—often all at the same time. In The Hoodie: Identity, Power, Protest, a new exhibition at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), co-curators Dr. Regina N. Bradley and Dr. Laura Flusche examine the hoodie not just as a piece of clothing, but as a deeply political symbol shaped by race, class, geography, and history within the American South.
News
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the winner of our 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize: Waterfalls by Lois Wolfe.
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize is: Feminine Morbidity by Maya Williams.
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the finalists for our 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize is: Feminine Morbidity by Maya Williams.
Features
Few garments carry as much cultural weight as the hoodie. First created in the 1930s by the brand Champion to meet athletes' needs for warmth and durability, the hoodie slowly became a marker of style, anonymity, suspicion, and resistance—often all at the same time. In The Hoodie: Identity, Power, Protest, a new exhibition at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), co-curators Dr. Regina N. Bradley and Dr. Laura Flusche examine the hoodie not just as a piece of clothing, but as a deeply political symbol shaped by race, class, geography, and history within the American South.
There’s so much about Jenny Erlingsson you don’t know. That’s probably because she’s a freshly minted novelist, author of the 2024 contemporary fiction title Her Part to Play. Before the book’s summer 2024 release, you would have needed to travel to Iceland to bump into Erlingsson in person, or you would have needed to be a part of her Milk and Honey collective of women writers.
A discussion between guest fiction editor Mary McMyne and Jennifer Givhan about her new book Salt Bones.
The work of literary translators has often gone unrecognized—unless it is a bad translation. According to an article in a University of California Press journal, Global Perspectives, which cited a study of New York Times book reviews between 2008-2021, the portion of translated works as a percent of the US publishing market may have crept up to five percent. [1] This is a pitifully small percentage.
Interviews
There’s so much about Jenny Erlingsson you don’t know. That’s probably because she’s a freshly minted novelist, author of the 2024 contemporary fiction title Her Part to Play. Before the book’s summer 2024 release, you would have needed to travel to Iceland to bump into Erlingsson in person, or you would have needed to be a part of her Milk and Honey collective of women writers.
A discussion between guest fiction editor Mary McMyne and Jennifer Givhan about her new book Salt Bones.
Jesse Graves’s first collection of poetry Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was awarded the 2011 Weatherford Award in Poetry from Berea College, the Book of the Year in Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers’ Association, and the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. More recently, Tennessee Landscape was celebrated with a tenth Anniversary edition, one that included new poems and an introduction from acclaimed poet Matthew Wimberley.
Book Reviews
A review of The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf 2025) by Donika Kelly.
On the whole, evocative and daring, an uneasy dance between the sand and the sea, Strange Beach is an ever-transforming shore, a space of encounter between bodies and meaning, between history and the new.

